The scores of college-bound Hawai'i students on the SAT were relatively unchanged from last year and still continue to lag slightly behind the average scores nationwide, according to 2009 results released yesterday by the College Board.

Compared to 2008, Hawai'i's combined scores for public, private and religious schools were unchanged in math and decreased two points in reading and one point in writing.

The SAT combined average scores for Hawai'i this year were:

• 502 in mathematics (out of a maximum of 800), compared with 515 nationally.

• 479 in critical reading, compared with 501 nationally.

• 469 in writing, compared with 493 nationally.

When the scores are broken down, Hawai'i's public school students again fared significantly lower than their private school counterparts on the college entrance exam. Hawai'i's public school students averaged 474 in math, 454 in reading and 441 in writing.

Hawai'i's private school students averaged 574 in math, 537 in reading and 535 in writing. Religious school students averaged 539 in math, 516 in reading and 514 in writing.

The College Board, which administers the test, cautions against making comparisons between schools. Students don't have to take the test and demographics and other nonschool factors, such as access to expensive test preparation courses, can have a strong effect on scores.

Through the early 1990s and early 2000s, average scores nationally on the SAT college entrance exam moved steadily upward. Now, for the last five years, they've been drifting back down.

The reason? Unlike on the multiple-choice sections of the test itself, there's no one right answer. But a big factor is the larger, more diverse group of students taking the tests, combined with a widening scoring gap between the best-performing groups and those whose numbers are growing fastest.

National results released yesterday show the high school class of 2009 earned a combined score of 1509 on the three sections of the exam, down two points from last year. The average reading and writing scores dropped a point each, while math scores held steady.

The average score is down nine points since 2006, when the writing section was first included and the test moved to a combined 2400-point scale.

Math scores are higher over the past decade, but reading scores are four points below their 1999 level.

The College Board emphasized the growing diversity of SAT-takers. Minorities made up 40 percent of last year's group, and more than a quarter of the 1.5 million test-takers reported English was not their first language at home.

That's good news in that more students aspire to college, but it also weighs down the overall scores because, on average, students from most minority groups score lower.

The exception is Asian-Americans, whose average combined score surged 13 points to a combined 1623, while scores for whites fell 2 points to 1581. For black students, average scores dropped 4 points to 1276. Average scores for two of the three categories the College Board uses for identifying Hispanics also declined, and overall ranged from 1345 to 1364.

Men also widened their advantage over women by three points; men scored 1523 on average compared to 1496 for women. The difference comes mostly from math scores.

The SAT remains the most common college entrance exam, though the rival ACT has nearly caught up in popularity. Most colleges accept either, and a growing minority no longer requires either one.

College Board officials don't attribute the widening SAT scoring gap directly to race but to factors that correlate with race, such as the likelihood of exposure to a rigorous high school curriculum. Students taking a core curriculum — including four years of English and three each of science, social science and history — scored 44 to 46 points higher on each section of the SAT.

"Our data suggest the gap is widening as academic preparation widens," said Wayne Camara, the College Board's vice president of research and development.